Dream Machine 2011: How We Created the Best PC Ever

Sexiest Rigs in Dream Machine's History

While unadulterated power and performance are a given in any Dream Machine build, aesthetics play an important part in setting our annual homage to excess apart from the pack. Still, some stand out more than others in looks.

DREAM MACHINE 2002

This DM was inspired by BMW’s famous 2002 Turbo, which audaciously featured its moniker in reverse to kindly let shepherds in the fast lane know to get the flock out of the way. Besides mimicking the 2002 treatment, this box famously featured the GPU that brought ATI back in front with a vengeance: the Radeon 9700 Pro.

DREAM MACHINE 2004

Jim Saling of Smooth Creations is no stranger to the Dream Machine, having custom painted four of our premiere builds, including this year’s. DM2004 marked paint job number two in that history, rendering a Silverstone Nimitz SST-TJ03 case all the more impressive.

DREAM MACHINE 2008

The year 2008 saw the most expensive case ever used for a Dream Machine. We managed to pull off an incredible deal to procure an HP Blackbird 002 case ($1,000) and then had the entire sucker chromed by Computer-choppers.com, which cost well north of $5,000 to do. It was the epitome of bling.

DREAM MACHINE 2012

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We want to hear from you! How should Dream Machine 2012 look? What should it include? Comment below, or send your ideas to comments@maximumpc.com.

But Is It Overkill?

Three GTX 580s is a lot, we’ll admit. You’re not going to find any games out right now that’ll push Dream Machine ’11 to its limits, but that doesn’t mean this system is overkill—far from it. Here’s what’s going to take advantage of the Dream Machine’s power:

BATTLEFIELD 3The scion of one of PC gaming’s greatest brands, Battlefield 3 will be both the first true PC shooter to come along in 2011 and (hopefully) the first game to really take advantage of the graphics hardware in a cutting-edge PC like ours. Though it’s being released on consoles simultaneously, the PC version of BF3 is clearly superior, with better graphics, larger maps, and more players per dedicated server.

RAGEWe’ve got a few misgivings about Rage. We hate to see a great (arguably the great) PC developer creating a game with a console as a main focus, but we’ve got enough faith in Carmack that we believe the game will still be able to take advantage of a PC’s extra power. Rage also marks the first use of the id Tech 5 engine, practically guaranteed to power some monster titles going forward.

UNREAL ENGINE 3Unreal Engine 3 is hardly new (it’s been around since the first Gears of War game launched), but it’s been evolving all along. The latest batch of updates, announced at GDC 2011, includes some advanced features like deferred rendering, subsurface scattering, and image-based reflections. There aren’t any games that have officially committed to taking advantage of the new features yet, but we expect to see some soon. In the meantime, check out the amazing technical trailer (which takes three GTX 580s to run at 1080p resolution).

Dream Machine 2011 Hits the Test Track

CAN IT PICK UP WHERE LAST YEAR'S 12-CORE MONSTROSITY LEFT OFF?

Dream Machine 2011 looks great, runs fairly quiet, and its parts list is to die for. But it’s not just about looks and specs, it’s also about performance. Can this machine outpace its predecessor? After all, if technology can’t march forward in 12 months, something is drastically wrong.

And we don’t say that without first taking a really long, Jim Kirk–style pause to seriously ponder whether Dream Machine 2011 can beat Dream Machine 2010. That’s because Dream Machine 2010 was an especially monstrous King Kong of a PC. Just recalling the specs of last year’s Dream Machine is enough to make us pucker up in fear: not one, but two 3.3GHz hexa-core Xeon X5680 CPUs overclocked to 4GHz. Three EVGA GeForce GTX 480 Superclocked cards in tri-SLI, 24GB of DDR3/1600, and two 200GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSDs in RAID 0. Dream Machine 2010 was so mean, we had to feed it five netbooks for breakfast and then sweep up the tablets it crapped out all day long.

What can a lone Core i7-2600K do against that? A lot more than you’d expect. DM2011’s first victory came in our Lightroom 2.6 test where we convert a folder of raw photo files from a Canon 5D Mk II to Adobe DNG format for archival purposes. Fairly limited in threading, the benchmark favored the higher clocks of DM2011, which trounced the older DM2010 by 27 percent. That score is also a new benchmark record in the Lightroom test. We suspect that part of the win is due to the RAID 0 Vertex 3 drives. In some storage benchmarks we ran, the Vertex 3s were pushing in excess of 1GB/s read speeds and 500MB/s write speeds. No, that’s not a typo—in excess of 1GB/s read speeds! You can thank the SandForce 2 controller in the OCZ drive and the excellent SATA 6Gb/s implementation in the Z68 chipset.

ProShow Producer 4 also gave the nod to DM2011, by 16 percent, surprisingly, despite the application support for more compute threads. Clock speed and disk I/O couldn’t help this year’s Dream Machine beat last year’s in our MainConcept Reference encoding test, however—but the loss wasn’t as bad as you’d think. The dual-proc Dream Machine 2010 bested DM2011 by roughly 10 percent. Unfortunately, we were unable to run our Vegas Pro 9 benchmark on last year’s Dream Machine because of a bug in one of the app’s plugins that affects 12-core machines, but we’re pretty sure DM2010 would be favored. Once we moved to graphics, DM2010’s tri-SLI 480s ate dust from this year’s tri-SLI 580s, with STALKER favoring DM2011 by 24 percent and Far Cry 2 (mostly a CPU test at this point) also taking 15 percent. In 3DMark Vantage, the two machines split wins. In the graphics portion, DM2011 took down DM2010 by a healthy 32 percent. But the 12-core monster came back in the CPU portion, with a score that was three times that of the DM2011. In fact, the only machines we’ve seen beat DM2010 in that test are other SR2-based machines running on liquid nitrogen.

We’re happy to report that we’re mostly vindicated on our choice of the tri-SLI cards over quad-SLI. Using the brand-new 3DMark 11 test, DM2011 was able to ace all of the machines from our small form factor roundup in the July issue, three of which featured either quad-SLI or quad-CrossFireX, using two dual-GPU cards as well as overclocked processors.

In the end, Dream Machine 2011 accomplishes what we wanted. It’s the best PC you can build at this moment and it’s even fairly well-mannered. It doesn’t spool up with the sound of 1,000 fans and it uses less than 180 watts (sans monitors) while idling. We’ll call that a win.

Comments

last years dream machine they went balls to the wall with everything, if you would have read previous dream machine coverage, you wouldve know that they were going to tone it down a bit. And how can you build a machine with parts that re not available?

"CoolingNot Using: A Full Custom Water-Cooling LoopWe can hear you now: how can you possibly consider anything a Dream Machine without a full custom water cooling loop? That's a good question, and shut up. The simple answer is that it makes upgrading and swapping out parts (especially video cards) a pain in the butt. And there's nothing dreamy about that. Plus, if we did the same thing every year, we'd get bored."

I don't really think the graphics cards are practical. They're way too close together and running all three of those at near 100% usage would probably overheat them and cause them to reset and down clock. The 2010 dream machine was a powerhouse and I loved that it was fully water cooled. (without it, the noise of two 580's at 100% fan speed would be a nightmare)

Other than that, I really like it. The case is very sexy and the cable management is superb!

Thanks for posting this, I was having a hard time waiting this year. Very nice system!!! You really get alot for the money this year in looks, style, and performance. Also, the build can be upgraded in the future easily. Most, people would not need all that power to play games but what a gamer it is. One could build a slimmed down version and still be very satified on any buget. What the Dreeam Machine defines is the best avaialble now, more or less, and it is what it is, so, if September is the month for the Dream for all time, then so be it and keep them coming. It is not exactly what I would have built, but I like it very much. I would have used a sound card and a 5.1 speakers because I like suround sound. The 2011 Dream Machine lives even in this economy!! Whats your dream?

Called it with Smooth Creations (me and what feels like half the people who posted, anyway).

I knew you guys would go the sports car route after last years DM being a monster truck and the article about the the 9 components not included. Everything was suggesting a more slim and sleak performance build over raw muscle; and I must admit, it is quite a beauty.

I pay for the magazine because I don't have a computer in the toilet. The magazine versions of these articles are usually (but not always) deeper. And I like reading magazines.

I think it's cool to read about the ultimate computer and all, but I think it's in everyone's best interest that the wrong idea isn't being promoted. A few years ago, before the economy really crapped out, video card makers and the media were clearly working together to sell hardware, and it was common to find multiple graphics cards being recommended as standard equipment. This magazine in particular promoted the idea that we simply had to have two and three video cards to play the newest games. I saw the price of a high-end PC shoot from $2K to over $5K in the space of a few months, because we simply had to have three $600 video cards, RAID drive arrays, and high-end sound cards.

Game developers were in part responsible for this, as a few titles were almost unplayable on anything less. Developers called it future-proofing. I think commercial suicide would be more accurate.

Anyway, no one needs a $12,000 PC to play video games. Anyone who buys one either has more money than sense, or is just an idiot.

These dollar figures only help drive people toward consoles, and I don't think that's good for either the computer or gaming industries--or this magazine, for that matter.

I hope these builds are kept in perspective, and that we never return to marketing gear no one can realistically afford as standard or necessary equipment.

Glad to see I'm not the only one wondering why I pay for a subsciption. The last couple of months, I get my mag in the mail, open it up and get pissed off. Realize that there are a couple of new articles/reviews, but can count on them showing up on the web in a day or two.

I wonder who thinks "yes it's a technology magazine, but what are the odds that these readers will go on the internet?" My guess is that person has nothing to do with what's in the magazine.

Remind me again why I should subscribe to your magazine?? Last month half the reviews were posted online before I received my copy in the mail. Now DM is online before print? I understand you have to move at a brisk pace to keep up with all the changes in the world of technology but is anything going to be left for your magazine? This is a slap in the face to your loyal subscribers. Take my money and then take what should be exclusive print content for the first 30 days and give it away for free? Letters to the editor and user questions about how to upgrade the ram on their HP machine are great though. Thanks and keep up the honest work.

Why am I paying for my magazine subscription? This article is to be in the September issue and is one of the most anticipated articles of the year. So why am I seeing it in July, on the web, before I get the magazine in the mail? As a paying subscriber you expect to see the really good articles first.

I have to agree with Devastator 2000 on this one. As soon as I saw this posted my heart both skipped a beat (because the Dream Machine is my favorite thing you guys do) and sank a little (Dream Machine is also the major reason I subscribe). I even went down to check the mail in the vain hope that the new issue was crazy early. Now all the people who don't directly support you financially get to see the major event of the year at the same time or before we do. I just makes me a little sad. Way to reward your loyal customers...